A Change in the Wind
PRISM, which graphically displays climate data as part of a new "risk management' effort from the USDA, has introduced a new site that allows us amateurs to see what is going on, including (if so chosen) anomalous climate behaviors.
Here's this month's anomalous precipitation, charted:
SoCal had a smidge of rain, but so far doesn't look like good news for the West. Via John Fleck.
From a thoughtful Times story about the Pacific Crest Trail, and what Wild and Reese Witherspoon will mean for its future:
The Wild Effect may be just beginning. More readers are finding the book, which appeared in paperback in March. And a film adaptation of “Wild” starring Reese Witherspoon, being filmed now in Oregon, promises to put the story, and the trail, before an even larger national audience.
Some trail observers predicted that the Pacific Crest Trail will likely experience its version of “the Bryson bump,” a jump in hikers who attempt the whole trail similar to the surge in popularity the Appalachian Trail experienced after Bill Bryson’s best-selling 1998 book, “A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.” And the number of Americans on the El Camino de Santiago pilgrimage hike through Spain surged 200 percent in the year after it was featured in the 2011 movie “The Way” starring Martin Sheen, a tourism official said.
“The ‘Wild Effect,’ I think, is going to be long-term,” Mr. Haskel said.
Donna Saufley is a former board member of the Pacific Crest Trail Association who with her husband, Jeff, runs Hiker Heaven, a no-charge hostel in Agua Dulce, Calif., that is famous among thru-hikers.
“I’m grateful for the awareness that the book has created about the trail,” Ms. Saufley said. “People don’t care about what they don’t know about. The trail needs, and wilderness needs, as much support as it can get. And if it gets people outdoors and moving and exploring, that’s very positive.”
Agreed. Lots of folks have negative associations about celebrities and don't want them horning in on the scene, but in my experience, be it a little town (Ojai) or a cause, they tend to help. Perhaps it'll be the same with backpacking the PCT.
The writer of this story quoted almost no one worried about it. According to this well-crafted story, few if any worried much about more people on the trail. I wouldn't send them to Secret Camp, but I'd like to see Reese on the trail. Here's Secret Camp. Guessing allowed.
A year or two ago I launched a Twitter stream devoted to the thoughts of a hero of mine, John Muir, believing that no one better inspires a person to explore nature.
To be honest, found myself overwhelmed by life and dropped that thread for a while, only to pick up my current edition of Sierra magazine and find that the executive director of the Sierra Club writing a column about how if Muir were alive today, he'd be tweeting. In a piece headlined "Muir tweets."
Muir's newspaper and magazine articles described and exalted wilderness and opened the eyes of the American people to its value. Those short pieces, together with the detailed journals he kept during his travels, formed the basis for the books he wrote later in his life (he didn't publish his first one until he was 56). Muir had a gift for distilling profound thoughts into short sound bites. Sample "tweet": "None of Nature's landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild."
Well, in an Emersonian sense, Muir still is alive, and here's a tweet to prove it:
— Muirtweets (@muirtweets) October 18, 2013
Those of you who like Twitter and/or nature, please check out Muirtweets. Thank you.
An essay from Steve Almond a couple of weeks ago in the NYTimes Sunday magazine, has been haunting me.
As they say in songs, it went something like this:
As a form of disposable entertainment, the apocalypse market is booming. The question is why. The obvious answer is that these narratives tap into anxieties, conscious and otherwise, about the damage we’re doing to our species and to the planet. They allow us to safely fantasize about what might be required of us to survive.
Of course, people have been running around screaming about the end of the world for as long as we’ve been around to take notes. But in the past, the purpose of these stories was essentially prophetic. They were intended to bring man into accord with the will of God, or at least his own conscience.
The newest wave of apocalyptic visions, whether they’re intended to make us laugh or shriek, are nearly all driven by acts of sadistic violence. Rather than inspiring audiences to reckon with the sources of our potential planetary ruin, they proceed from the notion that the apocalypse will usher in an era of sanctified Darwinism: survival of the most weaponized.
There’s a deep cynicism at work here, one that stands in stark contrast to the voices of even a generation ago. And this cynicism has, I fear, become the default setting of a culture that lurches about within the shadow of its own extinction yet lacks the moral imagination to change its destiny.
Another word for that deep cynicism was coined by an underground rocker, quoted in a spiky art/writing/museum/collective/Internet thing called The Dread Exhibition. (Translation: Don't ask me to crush it into a sentence — you'll have to look it up yourself if you want the whole story.)
Here's the point:
Dread, that visceral sensation which can be used both to comment on and revel in the anxieties of our time…is best understood as an aesethiszed experience of fear,or, as sci-fi author China Miéville defined it in conversation with the DJ and curator Juha van ‘t Zelfde, “dark awe,” a grim negative to the sublime.
Think of Caspar David Friedrich, who could make even postcard-type pictures darkly ominous:
Until we understand this allure, this dark awe, we won't be able to overcome it.
Was driving through the warm little town of Ojai California when a monarch butterfly flew helplessly in front of my windshield and then shot up past the little car and out into the open air with a single flap of his wings. Fly on!
Delightful sight. Made me wish for an instant to get out of the car and give chase. That passed, but today I come across an utterly amazing story about monarchs except that well…to call this a story gives it too little credit.
The next voice you hear will be a familiar one: Ari Shapiro of National Public Radio, a wonderfully familiar name in science reporting, and deservedly so. Yet no matter how solid his work, that's not what makes this one special.
In this one, Atlanta Public radio takes nature/science reporting/writing to a new level.
In fact, they raise the bar two or three times, by telling the mind-expanding story of the migration of the Monarch Butterly, smoothly blending radio journalism, the visual geography of Google Earth, delightful, almost Disney-esque nature/science graphics, and citizen science.
Willie Schubert and his colleagues are pursuing similar geojournalism ideas on on an even bigger scale at Climate Commons, I learned at a recent conference of environmental journalists, but what Shapiro et al manage in the below is to tell an old story — the migration of the Monarch — in a complete new way.
It's jaw-dropping.
It's one flaw, as a commentator mentioned, is that it ignores the Western Monarch butterfly, which winters along the Southern California coast, and migrates northward along the West Coast far into Canada.
Eric Holthaus tweets an eye-opener:
Cyclone Phailin is set to become the strongest India has ever seen http://t.co/mAKhmgwW7g http://t.co/lNgBNOZb0P
— Quartz (@qz) October 11, 2013
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
He tells the story with intense power, beginning (interestingly) with the NOAA image.
Yet it's possible he buries the lede, as at the end of the story he casually mentions:
India has already evacuated
more than a quarter-million people in advance of Phailin’s
landfall, amid reports of price gouging for vegetables and other
supplies.
Whether or not this is enough to prevent disaster, it's amazing we haven't heard of it.
Budget troubles, apparently.
Update one day later: In fact, this morning the NY Times put the evacuations in the hed:
Point being that we can't stop a huge storm from coming on-shore, but we can prepare for its arrival. Adaptation, in other words. That's the real question for the 21st century. Will we adapt?
Newspapers are still with us, for a few more years. And, blessedly newspapers such as The Guardian have made free Internet access central to their mission (as discussed enthusiastly last week in The New Yorker).
So the newspaper industry staggers on — for a while.
But this past weeked Andy Kohut for Pew Research not only tolled the bell for the end of newspapers, he also had a warning for the news industry itself, regardless of media configuration.
Notably, a 2012 Pew Research national poll found members of the Silent generation (67-84 years old) spending 84 minutes watching, reading or listening to the news the day before the survey interview. Boomers (48-66 years old), did not lag far behind (77 minutes), but Xers and Millennials spent much less time: 66 minutes and 46 minutes, respectively.
The truly troubling trend for the media is that Pew Research surveys give little indication that news consumption increases among members of the younger age groups as they get older. For example, in 2004 Xers reported following the news about as often as they did in 2012 (75 minutes versus 77 minutes). The eight-year trend for Millennials was equally flat (63 minutes versus 66 minutes).
[even worse]
…a critical factor that emerges from the surveys is that older people simply enjoy the news more than the young do. The Pew Research Center’s latest surveys find 58 percent of Silents and Boomers reporting they enjoy following the news a lot, compared to 45% of Xers and just 29 percent of Millennials. This generational difference has been consistently apparent in the surveys over the years.
The big question remains: Can mid-level papers find enough subsribers — in print or on-line — to stay alive?
Looking at these numbers for the younger generation, it's hard to believe. Even TV could be in trouble.
The New York Times has been the world's greatest newspaper for some time now, but also has a long tradition of formality — speaking of all public figures as Mr. This and Mrs That. Even if the rest of the world is on a first name basis with LeBron and Hillary.
Another aspect of this formality is a reluctance to allow its reporters to use the first person.
That's changing. Now it appears — for example, last week in the Science Times section, and occasionally other sections — veteran Times people can write in the first person on the front page. When it's appropriate, and even if they're not writing a column.
Here's a wonderful recent example:
The Republican Party has long claimed to be the champion of business, large and small, and an advocate for fiscal responsibility. Yet now Republicans in Congress have precipitated a shutdown of the federal government and are threatening to let the nation default on its once Triple-A-rated debt.
How could this be?
Since no one in Washington seems to be listening to anyone on the other side of the standoff, I spent much of the week listening to voters and business people in Iowa’s Fourth Congressional District, a sprawling, mostly agricultural region that runs from Sioux City, on the Nebraska border, to Mason City, close to Minnesota in the northwest quadrant of the state. I picked the district because its representative in Congress, the Republican Steve King, has been one of the most outspoken advocates for blocking Obamacare, even if that means shutting down the government or defaulting on the national debt.
Great lead from James B. Stewart. Such a respectful approach to interviewing. Why not?
Joel Pratt from the Extinction Countdown blog brings up an astonishing fact. More than four decades after DDT was banned, California condors in the Ventana/Big Sur area still struggle (with an unfortunate lack of success) to produce viable eggs. Pratt writes:
The Ventana Wildlife Society (VWS), which manages the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus) reintroduction program in the coastal Big Sur region, first began to suspect in 2006 that DDT was affecting the big birds. Two captive-born condors successfully nested in the wild then for the first time in that region. The birds mated and laid eggs, but they soon cracked and the nest failed. An examination revealed that the shells were so thin that they didn’t even resemble normal condor eggs.
Since that time many more eggs have been laid in the region but 12 out of 16 condor nest sites failed between 2007 and 2009. Fragments of shells—all visibly thin—were recovered from those sites. Meanwhile, the condors released 650 kilometers farther south have enjoyed a 70 to 80 percent hatching success rate.
Checked with Pratt: yes, the research says that it's only condors that feast on dead sea lions are are suffering this problem. So Ventura County condors need not fear that particular fate (although microtrash, lead poisoning, and reduced habitat remain huge issues, needless to say).
Great commons pic from Gregory Smith:
We know a lot about climate change. As the IPCC says (for instance) in the just-released fifth assessment, we have "high confidence" that not only is the climate changing, but that our species has caused this change.
But on a key question — how much methane and CO2 will be released by the vanishing of permafrost in the Arctic — the IPCC has "low confidence."
That's what Stan Wullschleger, who helps lead a 100-scientist team investigating this question for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, pointed out when I asked him about the crazy range of uncertainty re: the loss of the permafrost in the Arctic range (from a slide he put up).
Estimates he cited stretch from a low of 7%… to a high of 90%.
Jeez. That's not a "range of uncertainty." That's just not knowing.
[Here's an EPA image that shows the basic idea of this on the Seward Peninsula]
Troubling. Both that the situation looks dire, and that we really don't know.
Kit Stolz